Lobster Festival

Having eaten (conservative estimate) 15 baguettes in the 10 days I spent on holiday, I decided to do a couple of days of intense carbohydrate avoidance in order to be able to show off my glorious tan to my many lovers, without looking like one of those giant cured pig legs that you get hanging up in tapas bars. Needless to say, after a breakfast of smoked salmon, a lunch of skinned chopped chicken breast, three litres of water and a decaf espresso I was dangerously bored and I foolishly arranged to meet friends for a drink after work. I was going to have a soda water *wry laugh*.  To cut a long story short, by midnight I was knocking back whisky sours having eaten lobster thermidor and chips. I am going to gloss over this lapse and go off on a tangent about lobsters.

Lobster thermidor is an interesting one. You don’t see it on menus much and, truth be told, I’d never tried it. In my head, it fits into a food box with prawn cocktail, steak Diane and black forest gateau. I guess that’s the 70s swingers dinner party box then. Even so, it was delicious.

According to Wikipedia, it was invented in 1894, is named after the summer month of the same name in the French Revolutionary Calendar, and is a creamy mixture of cooked lobster meat, egg yolks, mustard and cognac with gruyere crust. The one I had was definitely a white wine béchamel with parmesan, which shows how much you can trust Wikipedia. And all of this brings us neatly to the proudest moment of my adult life, which involves both Wikipedia and lobsters. Fancy that.

Picture the scene:

First year at university, and my friend C and I were struggling through Nerval’s ‘Les Chimeres’ as part of our French literature course. Do not read this book. The language was antiquated and the poetry opaque; it was difficult to read and even worse to write about. Nerval was the bane of my life for two solid weeks. When I later moved to Paris I went to the cemetery where he is buried and took a photo of myself doing a thumbs up sign. Anyway, back to Autumn 2004, sitting in a concrete bedroom desperately trying to make sense of the writings of a man who was, by any standard you care to put on it, insane.

Academic research obviously came in the form of google, and it was here that I first found a reference to Nerval’s lobster. He had said, in a discussion with a friend, that he couldn’t understand why people didn’t have lobsters as pets instead of dogs.  It’s not actually that funny, but when you’re trying to work out why exactly the recurring motif of a black sun in his poems means that he’s scared of women, you take what you can get.

I decided to bring Nerval’s pet lobster into the 21^st century, by launching it on that byword for truth and reliability – Wikipedia. C and I set about constructing an elaborate story that provided concrete ‘proof’ of the existence of the pet lobster, which according to us, and now the Wikipedia entry, some scholars doubted. The story revolved around a supposedly recently discovered letter that Nerval had written to his ‘childhood friend’, Laura LeBeau. You may have noticed that my name is Laura and ‘beau’ means handsome. I am quite vain... The letter does actually exist, but only because C and I wrote it.  In it, Nerval confessed that he had been in trouble with the police in La Rochelle (aka ‘where people go in French textbooks’) for stealing from the lobster nets. Having paid a fine, Nerval was allowed to keep the lobster he had stolen, name it ‘Thibault’ (I believe I had recently watched the classic Leonardo DiCaprio/Claire Danes reworking of Romeo and Juliet) and bring it back to the city.

We uploaded the story to Wikipedia, wrote our essays and thought no more about it.  Apart from occasional night terrors. About 3 months later, we checked back and were surprised to find that the entry had not been deleted for obvious lunacy and lack of supporting evidence. It became something of a private joke.

Fast forward 4 years and we are about to graduate. In the course of reminiscing about some of the crazy fun times we’d had, Nerval’s lobster came up. We decided to check up on the entry. Imagine our surprise when, not only had our story been embellished, but it had a footnoted reference link to a recently printed article in Harpers Magazine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A9rard_de_Nerval#Pet_lobster

Sure enough that esteemed publication had used the long lost letter (© me, 2004)

as the basis of proof in its article on Nerval, here: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/10/hbc-90003665

There is no real point to this story except, perhaps, don’t use Wikipedia as a source if you’re a journalist, but I do feel a huge sense of pride in this achievement.

Ps. Buy the t-shirt! http://www.etsy.com/listing/34315681/nerval-lobster-tee-ladies-pink-small-or